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Monday, February 29, 2016

Many on the Left are critical of Fortress Europe and its
lack of political accountability, but they are also generally positive about
the EU and see it as playing a progressive role in national, continental and
global politics. This does not mean that all of the Left are sympathetic to the
EU. The NO2EU campaign, backed by the RMT union, offered “left-led opposition to
the Euro super state” in European Parliament elections. The similarities
between this form of anti-EU politics and the anti-EUism of right wing parties
such as UKIP is alarming. Indeed the commonalities between far right and left
wing positions demonstrate the need for an explicitly anti-national as well as
anti-capitalist position.

Many on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum
see Europe as a counter-balance to rampant global capitalism. Europe is seen as
a blueprint for other societies to follow. Democracy and systems of state social
welfare are frequently mentioned by Bernie Sanders. Europe is held up as a
better model than the “casino capitalism” of America, for example. The supposedly
benevolent, enlightened EU is seen as an example of an alternative, socially
responsible form of capitalism.

Across Europe the far right, have moved away from explicitly
racist positions are now beginning to develop strong anti-Islam positions which
variously criticise Islam or its militant Islamist interpretation, focus on
some of the anti-democratic and oppressive features of specific forms of Islam
and argue they are incompatible with European ideals. This is a form of
exclusionism not explicitly based on racial prejudice but on the perceived
failure of Islam to adhere to what are seen to be European characteristics.
Rather than being a characteristic of the far right this hostility towards
Islam is now becoming a part of the normal political centre-ground. As well as
being seen as the site of a more “humane” form of capitalism, Europe is also
seen as the beacon of freedom and democracy. This has led many within the right
to portray Europe as being in conflict with “Islamo-fascism”. This discourse is
making its way into mainstream public debates. It is interesting that support
for this comes from both the moderate left and right of the political spectrum.

Both the pro- and anti-EU campaigners recognise that even by
current standards the EU is an undemocratic institution. They tap into and
appeal to populism by declaring Europe is run by and for the bankers, a regression
to conspiracy theories in which mysterious bankers pull the political strings
in order to ensure maximum profits. Indeed those on the Left arguing for a
Europe of peoples rather than bankers share a similarity with many on the far
right who also see Europe as under threat from rampant speculative capital. The
leave or stay positions share the same shortcomings: a false perspectives on
capitalism and therefore false solutions which will be unsuccessful and exclusionary.
Capitalism isn’t a conspiracy run by a cabal of fat cat bankers nor is it the
imperialist project of Merkel, Hollande and Cameron. The true secret of
society, the real power that drives it, is not that of an elite ruling, but
rather the social relationships that we enter into every day. We make
capitalism. To exit capitalism does not entail staying or leaving Europe. Support
or non-support for the EU is not and cannot be considered an anti-capitalist
position. It is important to recognise that the social welfare model that EU
supporters applaud was the outcome of the struggles of workers movements. We
cannot support the “enlightened” version capitalism of the EU; it must be
rejected. The EU is a political structure that is to help manage both capital
and populations. The EU is not and can never be an anti-capitalist structure. Our
critique is not geographical, about where the borders of our political
community should lie, nor is it technical, about the constitutional forms in which
the domination of capital over our lives take place. It is a class analysis. Workers
must be wary about getting sidetracked into discussing the management of
capital.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

The SOYMB blog has posted several times about the
short-comings of micro-finance and the over-inflated claims for it as a
solution to world poverty. This article confirms our opinion.

“A comprehensive DFID-funded review of extant data concludes
that the microfinance craze has been built on ‘foundations of sand’, for ‘no
clear evidence yet exists that microfinance programmes have positive impacts’.
Just last year, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Poverty Action Lab
reported the results of a randomised evaluation of microcredit in Hyderbad,
India, concluding that microcredit caused no significant changes in
consumption, health, education or women’s empowerment. Such findings deal a devastating
blow to the rosy narrative of microcredit, and yet somehow it still manages to
survive.

It’s time to stop pretending that microfinance is a
meaningful tool for development. When it comes to poverty reduction, we know
exactly what needs to happen. Poverty is a political problem, and as such
demands a political solution.

The microcredit industry is profoundly unstable, true, but
the bigger problem is that microcredit doesn’t actually work when it comes to
accomplishing its stated goal of reducing poverty. As David Roodman from the
Center for Global Development put it in his recent book, ‘The best estimate of
the average impact of microcredit on the poverty of clients is zero.’ "

So Hilarity Clinton won South Carolina with a campaign based
upon her political experience. She is the ultimate status quo candidate.
Hillary has accepted that she can’t really make any significant changes, and
she’s not going to waste time trying. She’s ready and willing to preside over
the present corrupt system. Hillary Clinton is a good investment for a
billionaire. She poses as a progressive and even sometimes as a populist but she
is neither. Witness her offense at Sanders referring to her as “a moderate,” a
term she readily uses to describe herself when speaking to affluent audiences.

As First Lady she promoted health care reform, without
success. She also took a keen interest in foreign policy, as she had since
supporting the Vietnam War in college as a Goldwater Girl. She’s always boasted
about being “strong” on what she calls “national defense.” She urged her
husband Bill to bomb Yugoslavia, in 1995 and 1999 as that country split up. For
the first time since World War II a European capital, Belgrade, was bombed—by
NATO forces. The results have been disastrous: failed states in Bosnia and
Kosovo, more ethnic cleansing, refugees, heroin trafficking.

What about experience
as a U.S. Senator? In her two terms she sponsored 713 pieces of legislation.
Three passed, all unanimously. One established a National Historic Site in New
York, another renamed a post office, another renamed a highway. More
importantly: while in the Senate, Hillary voted for the Iraq War Resolution in
October 2002. She defended that vote all the way up to 2014, when she finally
called her vote a “mistake.”

As Secretary of State, Hillary supported a continued U.S.
military presence in Iraq, even though the Bush administration and the Iraqi
government had agreed that all troops would be withdrawn by 2011. Hillary just
didn’t want to get out.

When mass protests erupted in Syria in 2011, Hillary
advocated arming Syrian opposition forces, to bring down the government by
force. But these forces were dominated by al-Qaeda aligned factions. Many arms
the U.S. provided are now in the hands of al-Nusra and ISIL. And she wanted to
set up a no-fly zone in Syria—more bombing.

As Secretary of State she advocated bombing Libya, claiming
falsely that Col. Gadhafy was about to commit genocide. The U.S./NATO bombing,
which was supposed to be for humanitarian purposes, became an instrument for
regime change and the murder of Gadhafy, sodomized by a knife while jihadis
cheered. “We came, we saw, he died.” Libya
today is a country in ruins, with two governments, ethnic cleansing, and rule
by militias including those loyal to al-Qaeda or ISIL. Hillary bears much
responsibility for this.

Hillary Clinton chose as her Under Secretary of State for
Eastern Europe a close aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, the neocon Victoria
Nuland, who like Hillary pressed for the expansion of the NATO alliance to
surround Russia. Her State Department boasted that the U.S. has invested five
billion dollars in an effort to support the so-called “European aspirations of
Ukraine.” This was an investment in regime change. It led to the violent
overthrow of an elected government in 2014. The point was to install a leader
who would not just bring Ukraine into the EU but into NATO and drive the
Russians out of the Crimean Peninsula where their fleet has been headquartered
for over 200 years. Ukraine hasn’t benefitted from the coup. Neo-fascists who
played a decisive role in the coup have been empowered like nowhere else in
Europe. Ethnic minorities have come under attack. The economy has collapsed.
The country is in a state of civil war.

Hilarity has boasted that the war-criminal Henry Kissinger
has praised her, saying she’d run the State Department better than anyone had
run it in a long time. Warmongers warm towards Hillary Clinton. She is one of
them.

The simplistic gender identity argument for Hillary that she
is female and “it’s time to have a woman as president” ignores the terrible
impact of the Clintons’ domestic and foreign policies on women (poor and non-white
women especially) at home and abroad – from the vicious 1996 welfare “reform”
(the elimination of poor families’ prior entitlement to basic federal cash
assistance, heartily applauded by First Lady Hillary) to the U.S. wars. There’s
also the highly organized identity politics of race, whereby the African-American
bourgeois elite rally the vote for corporate and police-state Clinton.

In this referendum, the solutions proposed by politicians,
both pro and anti-EU, will not work to better the conditions of the working
class and, if anything, will make matters worse. They want us to validate their
actions by putting an X on a piece of paper, thus giving them the power to act
on our behalf. However, we know that they will not represent us and will
continue to support the rich and the powerful economic institutions of
capitalism that are making our lives a misery. The only way that we can resist
the attacks is to gain control of our lives and our society. The Socialist
Party opposes the top-down approach adopted by the other political parties. We
need to promote non-hierarchical forms of organisation and methods of
organising. The future organisation of society that we envision will be one of
that is bottom-up based on groups which federate with each other and
co-ordinate on a world-wide level, independent of any current statist structure
whether national or at a European level. This will include all areas of
economic and social life such as the production, distribution and consumption
of goods and the provision of services such as health, housing and education.
We need to take control of our own emancipation from the grasp of authoritarian
ideologies such as nationalism, religion and cult of the leader.

In order to achieve this aim of complete political,
economic, social and cultural transformation we need to build on and strengthen
the global networks of the working class to create a new society, no matter
what country they live in. We are all facing similar attacks so we can have a
common strategy which can be adapted to local conditions. The European Union is
a political reality we have to address. Therefore as workers organised against
their national governments and ruling class (as well as uniting
internationally), the struggle moves us further towards an ongoing need for
europe-wide co-ordination. In some countries in the EU like France and Italy,
workers are much stronger than here in the UK. As such I think that those
countries in the EU are ones which push for EU-wide legislation on things like
workers' rights in order to stop countries with weaker workers – like here –
getting an advantage over them. One has
to defeat the idea of 'internationalism' in the sense of inter-*nationalism*
because it counters long-run socialist principles of universalism. But the
ambiguity of the term has increased by the notion of 'national
self-determination', a slogan with undesirable content and decreasing
practicality. Socialists must avoid both
defending the European Union and slipping into narrow nationalism.
Anti-capitalist politics can't be reduced to a defence of any geographical
territory. We believe another world is possible, so let’s start building it
right now.

Yesterday thousands marched against the renewal of Trident missile system and heard many politicians voice their opposition to it. The Socialist Party
too were in attendance at the demonstration, distributing our leaflets. Our
leaflet explained that the problem is not Trident, but war itself born of
capitalist rivalries and that "getting rid of Trident makes barely a dent
in the global killing machine fuelled by capitalism's wars over our bosses'
markets and resources".

If you are opposed to war and all that it represents—as any
right thinking person should be—you will advocate policies and take actions
which will make war impossible, by removing its causes. That is, you will seek
to transform society in the interests of human beings as a whole, without
restriction to so-called race, nationality or gender, by establishing socialism
in place of capitalism. To do what many on the anti-Trident march do—to object
to a particular type of weapon which might be used in wars, whilst implicitly
tolerating others—is to accept the inevitability of war, and the social system
which underpins it. Campaigning against nuclear weapons is an irrelevance. Nuclear
weapons are unlikely to be used in Syria, or Horn of Africa, or any of the
other myriad "trouble spots" across the globe. Tens of millions of
people have been killed around the globe since the end of World War II, and not
a nuclear weapon used.

For sure, we recognize that most on the anti-Trident protest
were well motivated: that to use a cliché, "they care" and seek to do
something. But actions if they are to be effective require more than refined
sensibilities. It is not enough that behaviour is well motivated: if it is to
be effective it must be appropriate. The marchers need to learn just what is
involved in keeping people free from the tyranny of death by war—whether at the
hands of nuclear weapons or more “acceptable” alternatives—and free also from
poverty and famine, and poor health and abject lifestyles, and all the other
social ills which are celebrated daily by capitalism. If we really care about
people we will want to campaign for their enlightenment; for an absence of
nuclear weapons and war—in a word, for socialism.

We need to address the root of the problem – the capitalist
system itself and vicious competition for profits – and how the problems
capitalism creates can only be solved when we abolish the capitalist system
itself. While it is important that workers oppose war, we need to recognise in
whose interests wars are waged. It's hard to think of a single war that did not
have its roots in the need of small elite to make profits. All wars, even
small-scale conflicts tend to be fought over resources, outside markets and
areas of influence, trade routes or the strategic points.

To end war – and the need to demonstrate against it –
capitalism has to be ended. It needs to be replaced by a global system where
the resources of the Earth are common to everyone. Competition and conflict
between elites over resources must give way to cooperation for the benefit of
all the world's inhabitants.

If you lend your support to a political party or
organisation that fails to oppose the real nature of capitalist society, how
our world is organised for production and how power is distributed, then you
are, in effect, supporting a system that breeds wars. What is needed is to go
beyond a moral outcry and to attack the system which creates war. Good
intentions will not solve the problem of war but there is a revolutionary
alternative: destroy capitalism.

Do you want to protest endlessly against each new war as it
arises? Or work for a new world of common ownership, democratic control, peace
and human welfare? If you are opposed to war, either oppose capitalism in all
its forms or settle down to a life of protests...

People can use an online form on the DWP website to
anonymously report suspects, listing their eye colour, piercings, scars,
tattoos and other details they deem relevant. Suspicions can also be logged
through the DWP benefit fraud hotline. The government’s constant attempts to
paint honest people – like low-paid workers relying on tax credits and
universal credit – as ‘skivers’ and benefit ‘cheats’is creating a hostile and
accusatory environment.

Government statistics show fraudulent claims accounted for
0.7% of total benefit expenditure in the financial year 2012-2013. That amounts
to £1.2bn. On the other hand £1.6bn was underpaid to claimants by the DWP.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Making Europe secure for the corporations and big banks. The
European Union is another layer of power over people. Its main purpose is to
serve the needs of corporations and financial institutions and is therefore an
obstacle to the emancipation of the working class. The majority of the laws
that people are now subjected to come from the EU rather than the individual
states. The EU does not need to respect local conditions and instead imposes
their own vision for Europe based on the needs of capital. The vast majority of
regulations have been to enhance the power of capital over the people. The EU
has created fortress Europe, endeavouring to close its borders to the rest of
the world, as well as trying to be one of the many self-appointed world’s
policemen. That is what the E.U. is all about.

Given the way the problems created for us by the European
Union, you might think the answer is to withdraw from the EU. However, the idea
that the working class would be better off outside the EU, ruled by their own
State, is a dangerous illusion. It is especially dangerous because of the fact
that this is the position of the far right parties who are not remotely
interested in resisting state power. Instead, their aim would be to install an
even more authoritarian regime with even more repression. The retreat behind
national borders, a move driven by the xenophobic ideology, will have serious
consequences for the spirit of co-operation and solidarity between the working
class of Europe. Ordinary people have a history of supporting each other
regardless of national origin. This tradition will be undermined as people put
what appears to be their self-interest over mutual aid. It may not lead to
actual war, but it has already led to a mentality of competition and conflict
that will only further undermine the effectiveness that comes from a united
European working class. A divided working class will benefit those who have
caused the problems we are facing in the first place, such as austerity and
repressive measures. Many who support withdrawal from the EU seem to think that
we can return to some kind of Golden Age of prosperity. However, this is
another illusion; this Golden Age never existed. They forget that their own nation
has never been their friend; it has always been the instrument of imposing the
interests of a small minority on the majority. All states operate by taking
power from the people to give to the capitalist class. It doesn’t matter if the
State is a few miles or thousands of miles away; it will still be out of our
control, operating in the interests of the ruling class. The political theatre
of the EU referendum offers nothing to working people: all we can do is fight
for our own material interests against bosses and governments of all
nationalities.

A vote for either stay or leave is a vote for capitalism,
that really is all there is to it. Capitalism is global. The power of multinational
corporations and banks, the major cause of the problems facing us, will not disappear
if a country withdraws from the EU. The global processes which are at work, the
movement of production and money across borders, motivated by the search for
profits will continue. International institutions such as the IMF and World
Bank will still have the power to impose austerity and policies that are
against the interests of local populations. Human needs will take second place;
it doesn’t matter whether the country is within or outside the EU.

The Socialist Party reject both the options presented to us
in this referendum: staying in the EU or withdrawal. The EU, like all states
big or small, is based on the giving up of power to a minority who use this
power in the interests of the corporate and financial elite. The EU represents
the unity of this tiny elite against the European working class. We propose
both an alternative method of organising society that extends to the whole
planet – world socialism.

What is your life really all about? When it’s the alarm
clock shocks you out of your bed. Then
you spend hours commuting to and from work where you face drudgery and daily
humiliation. You endure the boss, the noise of machines, the glare of computer
monitors and you submit to your employer’s need for you to be profitable. When
your body gets ruined, when your back and joints ache, your stomach grumbles
from stress, you try to remember that your body is not a machine in which it is
possible to replace a faulty part by a new one. Our work slowly destroy us.
This is the existence of wage-slave. This is the reality that you hide from
yourself. The Socialist Party believes that things can change. Let us not place
trust in those who claim to speak in our name so that our exploitation is
perpetuated. Let’s not surrender our strength to them, because we know by
experience that they will sell us to the highest bidder. Only sheep march
behind party leaders. Your power is dormant but nevertheless you are the active
force that can change the world. Wage slaves of the world why sacrifice
themselves to protect the capitalists’ interests. Reform of the EU or exit from
the EU is no solution, but only a change of management. To stand up for
ourselves, we must organise.

Friday, February 26, 2016

Enormous publicity has been given recently to the question
of whether Britain should remain in the European Union or leave it. But it is
all pointless from the point of view of the working class. It may be that some
groups of workers would find their position slightly improved being within the
EU; some groups might think their position would be slightly better outside it;
but the over-riding fact is that we possess no stake in the great
wealth-producing agencies of what the papers call “their” country. A referendum
is like an assassin giving his or her victim the choice of being strangled or
drowned. All the media – the newspapers, television, radio, and so on – are
getting intensely excited about the EU question. But like all the other
political questions we are told to worry about, all this noise merely reflects
disagreements among the owning class. It may be that larger companies think
there will be more chances of profit within Europe, resulting from a closer
engagement with the markets across Europe. It may be that smaller companies
think that their lesser resources won't let them compete if the big
conglomerations are cleaning up all the profits – if the bigger predators are
doing better, perhaps they will do worse. It will be obvious that all this
ferment has nothing to do with the basic position of workers in society. All
this furore, the endless discussions will make little difference to the mass of
people. If workers would only devote a tenth of the effort to their own interests
that they spend debating the interests of the various sections of the master
class, then we would have socialism double-quick.

The EU was set up to favour the sectional interests of the a
part of the capitalist class who thought that such an arrangement would be in
their economic interest, in the same way the campaign to leave the EU is being
largely financed by a section of the capitalist class who think that leaving
the EU will have an economic benefit to them. The SPGB isn't concerned with the
sectional interests of the capitalist class, it is interested in the working
class and achieving socialism. The SPGB has since its formation in 1904, held
the view that capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of workers,
therefore the only logical position for a socialist party is to opposes
reformism, that is to say reforms of the system distract energy and attention
away from the work necessary to create a socialist society, i.e. spreading the
ideas of socialism.

Cameron's EU deal is not going to make much difference even
from a capitalist point of view. It's essentially an institutionalisation of
the status quo as regards the relationship between euro and non-euro EU Member
States and new EU legislation on child benefits for workers in one EU country
whose children live in another (this will apply to migrant workers in Germany,
etc as well as in Britain). And it doesn't erect any legal barriers to the free
movement of workers, only some measures to make it less attractive to come to
Britain (and even this is being countered by the move from tax credits to the
so-called "living" wage which won't be affected). So it won't stop
immigration if that's what was intended. No wonder the Euro-sceptics don't
think much of it. In terms of the working class, the vote won’t bring socialism
closer, either way, so as a class we have no specific interest in the vote. As a
class we have no interest.

The most profitable corporations think globally all the
time. Real change will require global action. Piecemeal interventions have not
helped slow or reverse the pace of wealth accumulation by the capitalist class.
We’ll never truly change things unless we engage and galvanise new hearts and
minds.

Australia has been called America's "deputy
sheriff" in the South Pacific. The Australian government announced an increase
in military spending, including the biggest expansion to its navy since World
War II with 12 new submarines, 12 combat patrol vessels and nine antisubmarine
frigates would be added to the current fleet. Australia’s annual defence
spending will increase by $26bn over the next decade. Also seven additional
P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft, 72 F-35A Lightning II Joint
Strike Fighters, and 12 E/A-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft. Overall,
5,000 more personnel would be recruited for the Australian military and
military spending would be increased to 2 percent of the country’s gross
domestic product by 2021, in keeping with a pledge that Australia made to the
United States as part of its commitment to share defense responsibilities in
the Asia-Pacific region. It had promised the Obama administration that it will
invest in a stronger military. The Obama administration is likely to be pleased
that Turnbull, who recently replaced a more conservative prime minister, Tony
Abbott, retained the strong defense posture planned by Abbott, said Michael J.
Green, senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, in Washington. “Australia’s decision to go for the
fifth-generation F-35 fighters and the submarines suggests the government wants
a capability to go against the most capable adversary in the region, China,”
Mr. Green said, I think Beijing will read between the lines and won’t be
happy,” he added.

Japanese politicians now openly talk about growing defence
ties with Australia as a "quasi-alliance". This could see Japan win
the bid for Australia's new fleet of 12 submarines, which the white paper said
would cost $150 billion to build and maintain over the next 30 years – three
times the estimates.

Of course, the Australian government portrays itself as a force
for good in the region, but history says otherwise. In the past, Australia was
complicit in what John Pilger describes as “Suharto's genocidal conquest” which
allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies
to divide the spoils of East Timor's oil and gas resources. Researcher Sarah
Niner, disclosed "vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for
human rights abuses in East Timor" in the Australian Department of Foreign
Affairs. "The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely
tied to the DFA's need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so
as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea."

Once East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood
and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately
subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government
which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed's oil
and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognise the
jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea and
unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favour. In 2006, a deal
was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia's terms. Soon afterwards,
Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was
effectively deposed in what he called an "attempted coup" by
"outsiders". The Australian military, which had
"peace-keeping" troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents. In
the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government
has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue - money that belongs to its
impoverished neighbour.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

David Cameron has boasted of the UK government’s role in selling equipment
made by defence company BAE Systems to Saudi Arabia, Oman and other countries at
almost the same time, the European parliament voted in favour of an EU-wide ban
on arms being sold to Saudi Arabia in protest at its heavy aerial bombing of
Yemen, which has been condemned by the UN.

Oliver Sprague, Amnesty International UK’s arms controls
director, said: “The ‘brilliant things’ that David Cameron says BAE sells
include massive amounts of weaponry for the Saudi Arabia military, despite
Saudi Arabia’s dreadful record in Yemen. “Thousands of Yemeni civilians have
been killed and injured in devastating and indiscriminate Saudi coalition
airstrikes, and there’s strong evidence that further weapons sales to Saudi
Arabia are not just ill-advised but actually illegal. Mr Cameron should stop acting
as a cheerleader for BAE’s reckless arms sales and stop the flow of weapons to
the Saudi war machine pending the outcome of both a UN inquiry into the bloody
conflict in Yemen and the UK’s own review of its arms exports to Saudi Arabia.”

"Solar is a political animal. It shouldn't be but it
always has been."

In December 2015, the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada
(PUCN), appointed by Nevada Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval, voted to slash net
metering credits and raise fixed fees on solar customers by 40 percent, making
it prohibitively expensive for most Nevadans to go solar, and also making it
uneconomical for the over 17,000 people who had already switched to solar
power. Many solar rooftop companies shut down, hundreds of solar workers lost
their jobs and homeowners are left with higher energy bills than if they would
never have gone solar. The new net metering rate plan was enacted in response
to complaints from NV Energy that solar customers were shifting over $16
million in fixed costs annually to non-solar customers. The PUCN sided with NV
Energy's numbers, disregarding its own independently commissioned study that
showed there are no significant costs to non-solar customers from people
installing solar on their houses. The same body refused to protect existing solar
rooftop customers’ investments for 20 years under the old rates. The PUCN instead
voted a compromise to give solar customers more time to adjust to the new rules,
slowing the phase in of new rates from four to 12 years. That decision, for
phased implementation, according to solar supporters, does nothing to remedy
the irreversible damage already done. People are now paying NV Energy for the
privilege of providing them with solar energy.

The power struggle over power in Nevada is not unique. Similar
fights are playing out all over the country as regulated monopoly utilities
fight for control over who gets to own power generation. It's not just in
Nevada, but states like Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas that are pursuing
regressive laws and fees on modern energies. This is a blatant power move to
keep control in the hands of NV Energy. Solar is booming in the United States,
in part because of a precipitous drop in the price of panels and a 30 percent
federal solar tax credit, which was extended in December 2015. Currently, as a
regulated monopoly, NV Energy is guaranteed a profit by the government. The
utility is allowed a 10.5 percent return on equity.

Rooftop solar customers supply power to the grid during peak
energy use times and then are credited an equal number of kilowatt-hours if
they supply more than they use, hence the net in net metering. There is no 10.5
percent profit in this arrangement for NV Energy. If, however, NV Energy builds
a new gas-fired power plant, they will be able to increase customer rates to
pay for it and make that profit. Purchasing energy from myriad energy
suppliers, which is what rooftop solar customers are, rather than building a
new gas-fired power plant, would most likely be cheaper for their customers but
they are not guaranteed a profit by the government. It makes sense that Warren
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway purchased NV Energy in 2013 for $5.6 billion.
"Owning utilities isn't a way to get rich," Buffett said. "It's
a way to stay rich."

The rich are taking from the poor. The fossil fuel industrialists
are attacking anything that might bite into their god-given right to profit.

It is simplistic, right-wing logic to turn the victims of
social problems into the perpetrators and to seek to inflict punishment even
when it won’t fix anything. For many Americans the unemployment problem is that
people cross the U.S.-Mexico border without papers and steal jobs from
Americans so the solution is a wall and deportations. The end result, they say,
will be more jobs for Americans. It is not true.

Mexicans make up a little under half of undocumented
immigrants — a number that’s actually declining. More Mexicans are leaving the
United States than entering these days. Second, two out of five undocumented
immigrants came here legally as visitors and then overstayed their visas. A
wall won’t keep them out. Finally, consider the jobs that undocumented workers
do: They’re farmworkers, slaughterhouse workers, dishwashers, house cleaners,
landscapers, and so on. For each low-wage, exploitative job, there are winners
and losers. The loser is often the immigrant doing backbreaking work for below
minimum wage and without legally required labor protections. The winners are
those who profit: employers, their shareholders, and consumers who buy cheap
goods produced by workers paid low wages.

Americans pay a lower share of disposable income for
food than any other nation on earth. One reason for that is the exploitation of
undocumented labor on farms and in slaughterhouses. In fact, when Georgia and
Alabama enacted strict anti-immigrant measures a few years ago, farmers in both
states ended up with crops rotting in their fields because there was no one to
harvest them. Georgia turned to prison labor to fill the labor gap left by
immigrants. In other words, when undocumented labor was out of the picture,
legal U.S. residents were unwilling to voluntarily take the farm jobs that were
left vacant. Not for the working conditions and the wages being offered.

Undocumented immigrants are simply pawns in a larger system.
We all are. Like everyone else, they’re looking for jobs so they can raise
their families and improve their lives. Why do they come illegally? For one
thing, immigration laws are fundamentally unrealistic. For Mexicans, coming to
the United States legally can mean waiting for upwards of 20 years.

Robert Califf has been approved by the Senate as the next FDA commissioner reinforcing the impression of those who say the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street profiteers make money at the expense of public health.

Califf, chancellor of clinical and translational research at Duke University until recently, received money from 23 drug companies including the giants like Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, Merck, Schering Plough and GSK according to a disclosure statement on the website of Duke Clinical Research Institute. Not merely receiving research funds, Califf also served as a high level Pharma officer, say press reports. Medscape, the medical website, discloses that Califf “served as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant or trustee for Genentech.” Portola Pharmaceuticals says Califf served on its board of directors until leaving for the FDA. Califf also lists financial links to Gambro, Regeneron, Gilead, AstraZeneca, Roche and other companies and equity positions in four medical companies. Gilead is the maker of the $1000-a-pill hepatitis C drug.

He is known for defending Vioxx which is reported to have caused at least 50,000 heart attacks and events before its withdrawal. (Merck is said to have known about Vioxx’ cardio effects but marketed the blockbuster drug anyway.) Califf was instrumental in the Duke drug trial of the blood thinner Xarelto and a cheerleader of the drug despite medical experts’ objections to its approval and 379 subsequent deaths. Xarelto's serious and foreseeable risks were back in the news this week. Duke, where Califf directed clinical research, is still recovering from a major research fraud scandal that resulted in terminated grants, retracted papers and a "60 Minutes" special.

Califf is a Big Pharma cheerleader, “Many of us consult with the pharmaceutical industry, which I think is a very good thing.” Califf's confirmation amounts to a handover of the FDA to Big Pharma. He has been groomed and promoted because of his willingness to promote the interests of his benefactors in the drug industry and their investors on Wall Street. He is a Trojan Horse.

Nor is this an isolated case of Big Business entering and controlling government policy.
USDA head Roger Beachy, a former director at Monsanto,
FDA food safety czar Michael Taylor, one-time vice president for public policy at Monsanto,
Commissioner of the USDA Tom Vilsack who created the Governors' Biotechnology Partnership. Under President Obama, 10 new GM crops have been approved for 'safe consumption.'

There has been war in Afghanistan for the last 14 years and
a lot has been written about the who, what, where and when, but little to answer
the most important question - why? The story that the media promoted
continuously after September 11, 2001 was that Afghanistan was just a worthless
pile of rocks that had no economic value; therefore, the goal of the war must
be to deprive terrorists of a base and, as a bonus, to spread democracy,
protect women, and rebuild the country. But in 2010 they began to report on
"newly discovered mineral deposits…so big that Afghanistan could
eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the
world." But the story of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was hardly new.

Since the 1960s, it was reported by the Minerals Yearbook of
the US Geological Survey that Afghanistan is rich in natural gas, copper, iron ore,
gold, silver, and precious gems. Afghanistan has chromite that hardens steel.
It has barite that is used in oil well "drilling fluid." The 1963
entry on Afghanistan in the Minerals Yearbook says "known natural gas
reserves are substantial and have potential significance." The 1982 entry
reports about the Hajigak iron ore deposit that "a 1977 independent survey
concluded that the deposit was large enough and of a sufficient grade to
support a major iron and steel industry." The Minerals Yearbook came in
1992 reported "The country's rich
reserves of natural gas, estimated at 2,000 billion cubic meters..." The
Yearbook also reported "copper ore from a reserve estimated at 360 MMT
(Million metric tons)" and that "rich reserves of iron ore were
estimated at 1,700 MMT." In November 2001 Ishaq Nadiri, a professor of
economics at New York University, wrote that Afghanistan "...once exported
natural gas to the Soviet Union. It has large reserves of copper and high-grade
iron ore." In a December 2001, John F. Shroder, Jr., a professor of
geology at the University of Nebraska, said that he had studied the natural resources
of Afghanistan for decades and that it had "what may be the world's
largest copper deposit and the third-largest deposit of high-grade iron ore, in
addition to reserves of gas, oil, coal, precious stones." Professor
Shroder said that several American companies had called him "to find out
more about the prospects for post-war mining and hydrocarbon acquisition."

This news might lead
a careful reader to question the motives in Afghanistan yet the media consistently
reported that Afghanistan had no economic value aside from pistachios,
pomegranates, goats, and sheep. On December 13th, the leaders of Turkmenistan,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the vice-president of India met in Turkmenistan
where a table with four buttons was set up so each country’s leader could press
a button, simultaneously initiating the construction of the TAPI natural gas
pipeline. TAPI is the acronym for the four countries involved in the pipeline
construction. This event was big news in south Asia and was covered by all the
major newspapers in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It should have been big
news in the US and the West too, but the media ignored the story. A US State Department spokesman told the Press
Trust of India that "The United States congratulates Turkmenistan and its
partners on the recent ground-breaking for the construction of the natural gas
pipeline to Afghanistan..." Yet, the US media decided that this was news
that US citizens did not need to know. Many peace advocates have suspected from
the beginning that this natural gas pipeline is one of the ways that the
coalition of the greedy expected to profit from this war. Aside from the TAPI
pipeline there are many opportunities for the coalition of greedy corporations to
make a killing, so to speak. Selling weapons to both sides, opium smuggling,
and overcharging for shoddy construction and useless consulting fees are just a
few examples, but stealing minerals may be the driving force that makes the war
continue.

As with Iraq, the war in Afghanistan has been an unmitigated
disaster in its stated goals: to promote democracy, the rule of the law, human
rights. Afghanistan, year after year, has slipped down the Transparency
International corruption index until it is now tied for second most corrupt
nation on earth. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
shows that over 99% of spending in Afghanistan has gone to military spending or
supporting a corrupt government. Less than 1% has gone tor food, clothing, and
shelter for some of the poorest people on earth, the Afghans, now suffering through
their 38th year of war. What better way to steal the mineral wealth of
Afghanistan than to create a weakened government and a starving people? Now if
its unstated goals was to feed the greed of Big Corporations, apparently it has
been a success.

Scores of old age pensioners in Cumbria have been convicted
for committing crimes over the past 12 months, according to police figures. Theft
was the number-one offence committed. The spate of crimes committed by people
in this age bracket could be a direct result of being plunged into poverty,
according the UK’s largest charity for older people.

"The majority of elderly people are on a fixed income
yet rent and bills and other outgoings continue to rise…They live in
destitution and then end up in A&E,” said Hugh Tomlinson, deputy chief officer
of Age UK South Lakeland. Mr Tomlinson said the number of elderly people
seeking welfare advice and being directed to food banks had spiked in the past
18 months. “People are desperate," he added.

The dominant section of the capitalist class in Britain want
to stay in the EU, but they have a political problem. Their representatives, in
the Tory Party committed themselves to holding a referendum on the question. This
was unwise, from their point of view, as this is to delegate a decision of
vital interest to them to a population of workers that is largely uninformed on
the issue and whose heads have been filled over the years with patriotic
nonsense for other purposes. It is by no means certain that they will win the
referendum, though they probably will if they put the media organs they control
into top gear. Cameron and others are now presently warning workers that
leaving the European Union is a "leap into the dark" with unknowable
consequences. Martin Temple, the chairman of the manufacturers’ organisation
EEF, warned to leave the European Union would amount to a step into an “abyss
of uncertainty and risk.”

The main argument put forward by the anti-EU section of the
capitalist class is that it involves a loss of "our" sovereignty. It
may well involve a loss of their sovereignty but the rest of us
have no "sovereignty" to lose. Certainly, we have the vote and we can
use it to elect politicians to Westminister. But neither Parliament nor the
government can control the way the economy works. They can try but if they go
against the profit logic of the system they just make things worse. The most
they can successfully do is go along with this logic. They emphasise
Parliament's "constitutional right" to control the economy,
completely ignoring the fact that experience has shown this to be a purely
paper right. The capitalist economy works according to certain economic laws
which no government or legislative body can over-ride. So the argument about
sovereignty is not really about what the constitution may or may not say. It's
about the effective power that a capitalist state can exercise within the
capitalist economy.

Capitalism has always existed within a framework of
competing states, none of which is strong enough to impose its will on all the
others. States, as weapons in the hands of rival groups of capitalists,
intervene to further the interests of the capitalists that control them. They
do this by using state power to set up protected markets, raw materials
sources, trade routes and investment outlets. In normal times their weapons are
tariffs, taxes, quotas, export rebates and other economic measures. The extent
to which a capitalist state can distort the world market in favour of its
capitalists depends both on its industrial muscle. In the dog-eat-dog world of
capitalism might is right. Over the years capitalism has become more and more
international, more and more globalised. This has tended to reduce the margin
of manoeuvre open to states, i.e. has reduced their "sovereignty". The
sovereignty argument is really an argument within the capitalist class as to
whether they should give up some of the might of their state to be able to
benefit from the greater might of a larger grouping. In the capitalist world,
just as much as for workers bargaining over wages, "unity is
strength". The less stupid capitalists are circumspect. They realise that
Britain can't really go it alone, but has to be associated with some larger
grouping.

As socialists, we don't take sides in this inter-capitalist
argument. We don't support one section of the capitalist class or the other,
and we don't have any illusions about the "sovereign power" of
Parliament to pass reformist legislation that can make capitalism work in the
interest of the exploited class of wage and salary earners. Capitalism just
cannot be reformed to work in this way; so transferring some of the powers of
the House of Commons to a European Parliament in Strasbourg makes no
difference. Whether or not the British capitalist class stay in the EU is not a
working-class issue. Let the capitalist class and their parties and supporters
settle the matter for themselves. In the meantime we continue to campaign for
the establishment of a world society without frontiers where the resources of
the Earth are the common heritage of humanity and are used to produce the
things we need to live and to enjoy life for us to take directly.

Yet another tale of Big Pharma’s failings because it is in
the business for making profits and dividends for its investors. The number of
elderly patients being admitted to hospital due to adverse drug reactions is
‘one in three’.

Pharmaceutical companies are causing biased information to
be given to doctors about the efficacy of drugs, causing an epidemic of
misinformed practitioners that is “costing hundreds of thousands of lives”
across the world, it has been claimed by Dr Aseem Malhotra, an NHS cardiologist
and a trustee of the King’s Fund health think tank. Dr Malhotra is one of a
number of senior physicians, including the Queen’s former doctor Sir Richard
Thompson, calling for the Public Accounts Committee to launch an independent
enquiry into the efficacy and safety of medicines. There is “a systemic lack of
transparency in the information being given to doctors to prescribe medication,
in terms of the benefits of drugs being grossly exaggerated and their side
effects under reported in studies”. Last year the Academy of Medical Royal
Colleges launched a campaign to stop doctors from ‘over-treating’ patients amid
growing evidence patients are being over-diagnosed and treated for a number of
conditions, such as prostate cancer, high blood pressure and asthma.

Dr Malhotra said the prevalence of pharmaceutical companies,
which are “profit making businesses” being able to fund studies and drug trials
causes biased information to be recorded and reported on in medical journals.
This is in turn “creating an epidemic of misinformed doctors,” he said,
stressing that the heart of the issue is “corporate interest trumping patient
interest”.

It is this lack of transparency that harms patients through
the adverse side effects of drugs, Dr Malhotra said, citing an FDA report that
found adverse events from prescribed medications caused 123,000 deaths in the
USA in 2014 and 800,000 serious patient outcomes, which include hospitalisation
or potentially causing disability. The FDA report also states that the number
of adverse events from prescribed medications have tripled in the past 10 years
in America, he said.

In the UK, the elderly are at particular risk of adverse
drug reactions, Dr Malhotra said. Side effects of prescription drugs on the
over 75s, particularly if they are on more than one set of medications, can
make them dizzy and fall over which can cause a hip fracture and develop into
further problems. The number of over 75s being admitted to hospital due to
adverse drug reactions is one in three, and a quarter of these patients will
die as a result of these injuries, he claimed.

Two million Brits have become addicted to prescription drugs.

Peter Gotze, professor of research design at the University
of Copenhagen, has evidence to suggest that prescribed drugs are the third
biggest killer behind heart disease and cancer, with particular concern placed
on the effects of psychotropic drugs used to treat dementia, among others
illnesses.

“Institutions such as universities, medical journals and
doctors collude wittingly or unwittingly with the medical industry for
financial gain,” Dr Malhotra said. “We need a cultural shift towards
de-prescribing – and full access to the raw data from clinical trials for
independent scrutiny, as this will encourage pharma sponsored research to be
conducted at a higher ethical level,” he said, adding that until then “I
personally regard all industry sponsored studies as marketing until proven
otherwise”.

According to a 2014 report by the National Bureau of
Economic Research, the wealthiest 1% of U.S. households own about 42% of the
country's wealth. On the other side, the share of wealth owned by the bottom
40% of U.S. households amounts to just 0.3%. When it comes to income – the stats
are the same. The top 1% of U.S. households earn as much annual income as the
lowest-earning 40%.

America's four wealthiest families own as much as the bottom
40% - that’s 128 million people whose combined net worth is matched by the
wealth of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the Koch Brothers.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Sovaldi and the related pill Harvoni cost Medicare and
Medicaid more than $5 billion in 2014.

After an 18-month investigation into the high cost of
Gilead's hepatitis C drug Sovaldi—initially listed at $84,000 for a course of
treatment or $1,000 per pill—the Senate Finance Committee said the prices did
not reflect the cost of research and development and that Gilead cared about
"revenue" not "affordability and accessibility."

In 2008, the Texas attorney general's office charged
Risperdal maker Janssen (Johnson & Johnson's psychiatric drug unit) with
defrauding the state of millions "with [its] sophisticated and fraudulent
marketing scheme," to "secure a spot for the drug, Risperdal, on the
state's Medicaid preferred drug list and on controversial medical protocols
that determine which drugs are given to adults and children in state
custody." The Texas attorney general's office charged Janssen with bribing
Texas' mental health officials with trips, perks and kickbacks. Janssen also
paid drug company-funded front groups, disguised to look like patients, to
"give state mental health officials and lawmakers the perception that the
drug had widespread support," reported Bloomberg. Many alleged patient
groups agitating for approval of expensive new drugs or fighting so-called
"barriers" to treatment and mental illness "stigma" are
actually slick drug company marketing creations. Many are entrenched in schools
and on college campuses to capture "psychiatric patients" at an early
age, often ensuring decades of sales. In Texas, a Medicaid "decision
tree" called the Texas Medical Algorithm Project was instituted that
mandates doctors prescribe the newest and most expensive psychiatric drugs
first. The program was funded, not surprisingly, by the Johnson &
Johnson-linked Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $717 million on 5
million prescriptions of Risperdal to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in
troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq only to discover after nine years that
the drug worked no better than a placebo, reported the Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA) in 2011.

According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the
drug industry spent $272,000 in campaign donations per member of Congress last
year. He reports that there are more drug company lobbyists than members of
Congress.

Of course, Big Pharma aren't the only corporations that is
ripping the people off big time. It is simply that Big Pharma is just more
disgusting because it directly impacts a person’s health, in addition to their
wallet. They are creating a nation of prescription drug addicts by making
normal human behaviors a disease or a syndrome. Big Ag is another behemoth
entity gambling with people’s health to make a profit.

It has been a good year for Manufacturing, Pharma, Investments and Tech. It has been a bad year for Energy and Real Estate.

Bill Gates, 60, retains the Number 1 spot with a fortune of US$80bn. Gates becomes the first person alive today to have created a US$100bn fortune, having given away more than US$20bn to date. In January, he bought a new home near Seattle, a 6,000 sq metre property, for US$150 million.

Warren Buffett, 85, saw his wealth decrease by US$8bn or 11%, US$2.2bn of which was a donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett has recently been buying into oil refiner Phillips 66. Interestingly, 99 percent of his wealth was earned after his 50th birthday.

Amancio Ortega, 79, is back in the top 3 this year. Inditex, the mother ship of Zara, closed January with its share price close to historic highs. Daughter Sandra Ortega Mera also makes the list with US$5.5bn, inherited from her mother.

Jeff Bezos, 52, shot into the Top 10 for the first time with a US$24bn or 83% increase in wealth to fourth spot with US$53bn on the back of a surge in Amazon shares. Together with Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla fame (US$8.8bn, up 38% to 134thplace), Bezos has been making headlines for his space project: at the end of last year Bezos successfully launched and returned a booster and capsule from a suborbital flight. Bezos in 2013 purchased the Washington Post.

Carlos Slim Helu, 76, dropped out of Top 3 after losing 40% or US$33bn of his fortune, mainly on the back of big drops in America Movil and Mineras Fresco. The Mexican billionaire has built a museum in Mexico City to house his US$100 million collection of art.

Larry Ellison, 71, with US$47bn, saw his wealth drop by 15%, on the back of a reduction in Oracle’s stock price. Ellison has donated US$4m to the presidential campaign of Marco Rubio.

Mark Zuckerberg, at 31, the youngest member of the Top 10, has had a good year, seeing his wealth rise US$3bn to US$47bn. Zuckerberg made world headlines in December when he announced that he would donate 99% of his Facebook stock to a charity set up with wife Priscilla Chan.

Charles, 80, and David Koch, 75, retain their Top 10 spots on the back of a combined US$16bn increase in their wealth. Charles Koch is an important donor to the Republican presidential campaign.

With a net worth of US$37bn, Michael Bloomberg, 73, shot into the top 10 for the first time on the back of a rise in sales at his media group. Bloomberg is reported to be toying with the idea of running for President as an independent. He has donated US$1bn to John Hopkins University.

When people start talking about the importance of preserving
national independence it's a clear sign of a lack of socialist consciousness.
They may call it maintaining local democracy but what's meant is maintaining
local capitalism. The national capitalism of those who seek to leave the EU is
hardly credible: its “protectionist” programmes would only push capitalism into
recession, since the world’s economies are now too interconnected for such a
“national” solution to be viable. In short, national capitalism has no solution.

The problem for the EU is that there is no longer unanimity
among what may be termed the European capitalist class as to how the Union
should develop and what are the appropriate rules for possible structures for
it. The referendum debate is a manifestation of this and illustration of how
the governing ideas in society are those of the capitalist elite. One section
of the capitalist class, controlling large multi-national enterprises that are
involved in international manufacture and services are extremely
concerned about global competition from the USA or China, etc. and view
European unity as beneficial. Against
that there is another rival section to the capitalist class. These generally operate
smaller businesses acting in predominately national markets or trading almost
exclusively with individual countries outside Europe such as the USA. To them
other capitalists within Europe are as much a threat as those outside the EU.

Contrary to what some groups believe, the capitalist class
is not an eternally cohesive, Machiavellian cabal perfectly capable of imposing
its will and interest on wider society. It is riven by differences as each
capitalist strives to pursue their own economic interest and seize as much a
share of the surplus value produced by social production as they are able, by
every means at their disposal: legal, political, economic or criminal. The
means by which each capitalist secures their share of surplus value determines their
economic interest, and each capitalist will do everything within their
considerable power to secure and enhance that interest. The EU represents an
enormous share of UK trade, and much more than any other single region can lay
claim to. The City of London financial centre is a big factor in the service
sector and many of its exports and imports are a product of international
financial transactions, the shuffling of electronic claims to riches from one
side of the world to the other, and trading in currencies. A great many of
these London firms, then, will be dependent on being able to extract economic
rent from exploiting the restrictions on capital investment caused by currency
blocs, whether from pounds to dollars or pounds to Euros. They thus not only
have an interest in trading with economic partners other than the EU, but also
retaining the pound to protect their income from transaction costs. It is this
combination of interests which leads to economic nationalism being prioritised
over joining a trading currency zone.

The referendum is taking place in an environment of public
apathy and cynicism towards politicians. Interest in the political process by
workers is generally at a low ebb and this disillusion can only be reinforced
by “debates” such as have occurred on this issue. Real meaningful change to
peoples' lives can only take place when the root causes of the problems facing
humanity are considered on a worldwide scale. The working class has no interest
in this passing show of inter-capitalist squabbling over the EU, except to note
the spectacle and prepare for the day when there are no more nations to
squabble over so-called sovereignty.

We are kept apart so that we may be separately fleeced of the fruits of our labour. We are made to hate one another because it is the key to capitalist domination which enslaves us both. We are deceived and blinded that we may not see how nationalism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars us all.

Germany has that economic power-house reputation yet poverty
remains high in Germany among single parents, the jobless and elderly, say social welfare groups. Low-skill workers have become
disconnected from economic success.

2013 data from the federal statistics office, showing that
more than half or nearly 52 percent of net assets in Germany were owned by just
ten percent of the population. In a glaring contrast, half of Germany's
population of 81 million owns only just over one percent of assets.

Germany's "Paritätische" federation, representing
10,000 social welfare groups, warned that nearly one in six of
Germany's residents remained at risk of being trapped in relative poverty. The
term used across the EU refers to anyone, child or adult, who lives on less
than 60 percent of the medium income as measured statistically. In Germany,
that threshold is 917 euros ($1,015) per month for a single person and 1,192
euros ($1,310) for a single parent with a child under six.

15.4% of the population nationwide was stuck below the
poverty line. Relative poverty had climbed to a record 20% in North
Rhine-Westphalia's Ruhr District, once the engine of German heavy industry.

Despite record employment, poverty had not declined, said Dorothee Spannagel, a social expert who analyzed poverty trends for the trade
union-affiliated Hans-Böckler Foundation. She told the German news agency DPA
that the gap in Germany between poor and rich continued to widen. Spannegel
said the so-called low wage sector involving menial jobs had become
disconnected from overall economic gains. In addition, there had been a surge
in individuals earning from their capital investments. Spannagel explained that
an individual's chance of making it ahead had diminished and the risk of
falling into poverty had grown. In the 1980s, the risk of falling from the
middle income milieu into poverty had been around 12 percent, she said. Since
2005, the risk had risen to 16 percent.

The European Union’s trade commissioner, Karel de Gucht, told
the multinational oil company ExxonMobil that the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP) ‘free trade’ pact being negotiated with the US
would help remove obstacles to fossil fuel development in Africa and South
America, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. He told the firm that TTIP could
address its concerns about regulations in developing countries that restrict
the company’s activities.

According to minutes of the October meeting, the hour-long
conversation focused on shale gas; “geopolitical aspects”; EU plans to label
tar sands as high-polluting; and a possible reconversion of ExxonMobil’s
liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal in the US to export crude to
Europe. This would be “costly and may take two-three years,” the minutes said. Heavily
redacted records show that two officials from Exxon’s US and EU regions were
present in the room with de Gucht, the then-trade commissioner, Claes
Bengtsson, his cabinet member, and two other unidentified individuals. The
commission was keen to point out the advantages that a TTIP deal could offer
ExxonMobil, with respect to countries not party to the trade deal.

“TTIP is perhaps more relevant as setting a precedent
vis-a-vis third countries than governing trade and investment bilaterally,” the
paper says. “We think that this third country element is in the interest of the
energy sector, and especially globally active companies like Shell or
Exxonmobil. After all, companies like Shell or Exxonmobil face the same trade
barriers when doing business in Africa, in Russia or in South America.” The
commission was in effect saying that once the trade deal was in place, other
countries outside it would be progressively forced to adopt the same measures,
making it easier for companies such as ExxonMobil to expand into their markets.
At the time that the brief was written, several countries in the “global south”
were tightening regulations on fossil fuel companies for the first time in a
decade, despite ExxonMobil’s ambitions to open up shale gas fracking wells in
North Africa, Asia and South America. The briefing paper said that the TTIP
talks were a unique chance to write a new rule-book for global trade that
“could serve as a model for subsequent negotiations involving third countries”.

John Hilary, the executive director of the campaign group
War on Want, accused the commission of overstepping its mandate in the talks.
“It is tantamount to corruption that the European commission should be prepared
to work hand in glove with such vested interests in crafting deals that will
have a profound effect on our environment. The commission’s clear priority is
establishing a template for all future deals,” Hilary said. “It is critical
because it means that no countries will be able to tighten the regulatory
regime on fossil fuel companies operating on their territories.”

Dr Valérie Marcel, associate energy fellow at Chatham House,
said that in late 2013, fossil fuel firms had been increasingly fearful that
the long-term investment climate was changing. “There was a growing trend of
producing countries wanting to capture maximum windfalls from petroleum
projects,” she said. “They were imposing windfall taxes or threatening to
change contractual terms, so they [the oil companies] probably wanted to put
political pressure on those governments.”

Steve Kretzmann, the director of the campaign group Oil
Change International, described the commission’s behaviour as a “scandalous”
attempt to liberalise the global crude market that went beyond shale gas and
shale oil. “I see it as standard setting because it would allow the EU to place
greater diplomatic and political pressure on those [developing] countries to
lower all their trade barriers,” he said. “If the US is not doing this
protective policy anymore you shouldn’t either.”

A man can't help the class he is born into. William Morris
betrayed his class and sided with the working class. If you are a worker, do
you make common cause with your fellow worker to get rid of capitalism,
(revolution) as Morris did, or do you slavishly support reforms as most workers
still do, despite the evidence capitalism cannot be reformed?

Even the Left would not have been of the 'Left' as Morris
would have understood it. He well
understood that the revolution would only be made by the workers 'themselves'
and tried to assist in developing understanding for a society where buying and
selling would be seen as quaint behaviour from the annals of historical
capitalist development. He also understood that the new society would be a
post-capitalist one, using the technology thrown up by intensive capitalist
development, to produce a superabundance of wealth in the new society, with
common rather than elite, ownership and with free access to the common wealth,
rather than a rationed access via the wages system as at present. He knew that
all wealth flowed from labour and should return to labour with the abolition of
private property and the wages system. He is a political giant compared to the
leftist pygmies.

There can't be politics as we know it when we reach
socialism. As there are no vested interests competing for the means and
instruments of creating and distributing wealth. This doesn't mean there won’t
be competing ideas and arguments but the interests are common so the heat is
out of it. We won't know for sure until we get there but a world without buying
and selling, without waged slavery ,without war, without government over people
but rather an administration by the people over things will certainly have us
relating differently to one another. This is essentially what Morris was
exploring and speculating about.

We need to get out of the present capitalist schooled,
'combative', 'competitive', mindset, to get what Morris was driving at in his
abstractions. Until the workers arm themselves with the knowledge of their
common class interest, to remove the parasite class from their ownership of the
means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth and establish common
ownership, without social classes or elites, then capitalism will continue in
its present decadent phase, from crisis to crisis, even to war, just as feudalism
did.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

When the referendum on staying in the EU comes, we'll be
advocating that people write “World Socialism” across the ballot
paper. The Socialist Party often talks of ‘the capitalist class’ doing that or
wanting this as if they were a monolithic whole with a single interest. In fact
different sections of the capitalist class have different interests. Their
attitude to the EU is a case in point. This dispute within the British
capitalist class has no class interest for workers. Whether British capitalism
is in or out of the EU will make no difference to their position as a class
forced to work for a wage or a salary and won’t affect the problems they face
either way. So, when the referendum comes, you won’t find us joining with
the xenophobic right and the xenophobic left. We’ll be advising workers to understand
their class position. What do they mean by losing our sovereignty? Not
having a stake in the country we have nothing to lose. Our rulers may have to
hand over part of their law-making powers to the EU, but that's not our worry.
It makes no real difference whether we are ruled from Brussels, Strasbourg or
London. We are neither for nor against membership of the EU and regard it as an
irrelevant issue.

No wealth is produced in the City of London. It is a place
where the proceeds of working-class exploitation transformed into rights to a
property income are the subject of trading, speculation and gambling. Around
this has grown up a whole range of “financial services” – wheelers and dealers
of one kind or another – vying for a share. In short, it is entirely parasitic
on those parts of the world economy where wealth is actually produced by those
working there. So – apart from the fact that the Conservative Party has always
been committed to defending the interests of The Square Mile, going back to the
time when it was the place through which the loot plundered from the British
Empire was channelled – and that’s why Cameron make such a fuss about defending
The City “from Europe” and expect people to think that this was a good thing?
The City is an important part of the British capitalist economy which no
government can ignore. But The City is not the only section of the capitalist
class. There are also the businesses producing for export. It was precisely to
further their interests by gaining them free access to a wider European market
that Britain joined the “Common Market” in the first place. They still benefit
from the single market with its common standards and regulations and do not
want Britain to withdraw from the EU.
The Euro-sceptics represent small businesses producing for the home
market (and financed by some bigger businesses in the same position). They want
a withdrawal from the EU. This is a
dispute between different sections of the same capitalist class which should be
left to them to settle for themselves. No working class interest is involved.
As socialists we refuse to pander to petty nationalism but work to promote a
world without frontiers where the Earth’s resources have become the common
heritage of all. The important point is that workers in all countries face the
same problems and so have a common interest in uniting to solve them.

We suggest abstention, or rather rejection of the false
choice by writing "WORLD SOCIALISM" across the
ballot paper.